gambling

I've been reading The Determined Angler, an 'anthological' work about fishing by Charles Bradford. It was published in New York in 1916 and it includes a wide range of quotations about angling. I think that - as today's contribution to the blog - I'll just post a few that struck me. The first raises the question of luck again. Like many of the writers quoted by Bradford, this one uses a pseudonym:

Speculation in Angling.—I often wonder if the basis of fishing is not founded upon the element of chance, and whether fishing does not fascinate because it is a species of gambling. To a degree it is a hazard. You take your best tackle, select your choicest bait, and you do more, for you pray to the goddess of success.—"Ancient Mariner."

I posted here about the poem by Leonidas of Tarentum in which the fisherman, Parmis, becomes the victim of Tyche, another capricious goddess and one to whom the Greeks did indeed offer prayers in the hope of success: 'I entreat you, child of Zeus the Deliverer, saving Tyche, keep protecting [the city], and make her powerful' (Pindar, Olympian 12).

on drawing

I've written before about fishing as a practice in which 'internal' factors (skill, effort, preparation) enter into a relationship with 'external' factors (chance, luck, or - more figuratively - grace) and the fact that some of pleasure of angling seems to lie in this interaction. It is presumably important that the 'external' factors feel a little beyond the possibility of control - or at least on the edges of what can be influenced by the human agent. They need to be unpredictable - not necessarily a matter of pure chance but not easy to grasp and influence. (When you read fishing books, it is striking how often particular aspects of the behaviour or fish are described as unknown or not well understood.)

Over the past few years I've been trying to learn to draw better and it's just struck me that there is something of the same dynamic in that process too - if we're talking about drawing from life, at least. Beginners are always told that they should draw what they see. But it can be strangely difficult to make sense of what you are seeing in a way that allows you to represent it on paper. It is as if the visual stimulus needs decoding before you can draw it with any accuracy and time and again I have found myself struggling with this decoding - failing to 'see' what is before my eyes.

Perspectival drawing provides a good example. If we could really 'draw what we see' in any straightforward sense, we wouldn't need the rules of perspective. After all, their function is simply to describe the way the three-dimensional world appears to us from various different positions. But faced with a complex pattern of rooftops or an up-hill street bordered by houses, it is very difficult to capture them on paper without resorting to the guidelines that the theory of perspective provides.

On my book-shelf I have  a beginner's guide to perspective and, in a blog on fishing, it seems appropriate to talk about the section with the title 'by lake and river'. There is a problem with drawing reflections in water. Objects positioned at more or less the same height as the surface of the water are mirrored in a fairly straightforward way. But the reflections of objects that are further back and raised up on a hill or incline are cut off from view by the land itself. This is so difficult to describe in words that the author, John Raynes, offers some images to clarify it. In the photo below, a model of a river bank is placed on a mirror and images of trees placed at different points upon it. The tops of the 'trees' are at various different heights but, because of the 'cut-off' effect, the 'trees' in the reflection are all much closer together. As the author says: 'The trees are placed at various distances and heights relative to the water/mirror but it is not immediately clear why the reflections are as they are.' The perspectival analysis simply describes what you can already see but 'understanding why [this effect occurs] will help you to see it more perceptively.'

Grappling with the problems that real scenes and objects present is part of the pleasure of drawing. And a combination of knowledge and experience makes it possible to make sense of previously baffling problems and increasingly bring them under control. Is this like the dialectic of 'internal' and 'external' in fishing? Drawing and writing both approximate to the condition of angling in different ways and, in each case, it is something about living on the border between what you can control and what you can't.

the margin of luck

Something that surfaces here now and again is the relationship between, on the one hand, skill, effort, or preparation, and, on the other, chance, grace, and luck - between what one can do for oneself and what comes from elsewhere, eluding human control. For simplicity, I'll talk about these as internal and external factors. Skill, effort, and preparation aren't identical concepts but they are all internal to the agent and, to some extent, susceptible to control. Likewise, chance, grace, and luck aren't all the same but can all be seen as external to the agent, operating in spite of the efforts made to influence them.

The book I bought when I went to see my parents includes an essay by Tim Goode called 'Catching Big Fish' and the essay tells an interesting story about the history of this specialist area of angling:

Before World War II, the capture of a big fish was regarded as a matter of good fortune. The possibility of narrowing the margin of luck was hardly considered and, if it was, disregarded. The concept of a man directing his angling towards the capture of 'glass-case-sized' fish would have been greeted with laughter.

Goode goes on to explain that attitudes changed in the years immediately after the war, when a small group of anglers began developing techniques to improve their chances of landing really enormous specimens of carp. (The idea of searching for astonishing individuals from different species of fish gave rise to the name of this branch of angling - 'specimen fishing'.)

I'm interested in this story - the reconceptualisation of something originally seen as a question of luck into a matter of skill. This, I think, feels like the narrative of technology more broadly: 'This is not a matter of chance or fortune - we can prevent the illness, build the flood defences, predict when the earthquake will come.' But, in spite of our technological advances, a sense of the external still haunts us. In fact, the very distinction between the internal and external becomes more complex all the time. As science has more to tell us about the life of the individual - the factors that produce our characters, capabilities, weaknesses, and proclivities, we (collectively) have more control but we (individually) may have less, and the very opposition between inside and outside becomes a less familiar terrain and one that feels a little frightening to walk through.

Writing is variously described as a craft (internal) or something gifted to the writer (external). There are now many guides for writers which characterise the process as similar to the story of the king and the fisherboy - the wonderful catch is, to some extent, a matter of chance or of providence, but it will never happen if you don't turn up regularly and cast your line into the sea. Similarly, you can never be sure that what you write will be good. You can only make it possible for grace or chance or luck to intervene by sitting down regularly and writing.

There is nothing very profound in what I've said here but the relationship between internal and external is figured powerfully in the imagery of fishing and perhaps nowhere more than in the competition between the angler and the fish on the line - a direct struggle between the skill, preparation, and effort mustered by the self and that other will, pitted against your own, fighting with all its might to elude your control.

Stuffed fish in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. [By Herry Lawford [CC-BY-2.(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.]

back on the hook

I posted here about the story of Hoderi and Howori, the two brothers in the Kojiki, one who 'finds his luck' in the mountains and the other on the sea. The crux of the story is that they exchange their 'luck' and, when Howori goes fishing with Hoderi's tackle, fails to catch any fish and loses the hook in the waves. When I first wrote about this, I found Hoderi's intransigence over the lost hook annoying. Howori breaks up his sword and makes five hundred hooks to replace the old one. But Hoderi is having none of it and insists on the return of the original. Since then, however, I've consulted a newer edition of the Kojiki - not 'new' exactly, just newer than Chamberlain's - and learned a little more about it.

First of all, more recent work on the phonology of Old Japanese apparently shows that the syllable which Chamberlain transcribes as 'ho' was actually pronounced 'po', so we should really call the brothers Po-deri and Po-wori. Second, there is some discussion in this newer edition of exactly why Po-deri is so insistent on the return of the hook:

The meaning of the word sati in this chapter is vital. Even today the word shachi, a divine blessing or magic power, is used among hunters to refer to luck in the hunt. This 'luck' can be gained and imparted by certain magic practices, and the magic is thought to dwell in the hunting implements - for the modern hunter, the rifle bullets, which are shachi-dama ('luck balls')

This point is underlined in a discussion of the folklore of hunting by the German scholar of Japan, Nelly Naumann. (Apologies for the rather stilted translation!)

The word shachi is often used in the language of hunting. We'll meet shachi-iwai or shachi-matsuri as a thanksgiving ceremony after the killing of wild game. The term shachi-ya means an arrow with which an animal was hit, while shachi-dama or shachi-maru is the bullet with which an animal was killed ... ; shachi-no-mi is venison. If a bullet kills an animal on the first shot, one says shachi ga mukaita, 'the shachi obliged'. However, if one has missed the target several times, one says sono mono no gu wa shachi no kiretari, 'the shachi of this gear is exhausted'. And if one doesn't shachi wo tsugu quickly - 'replace the shachi' - the equipment becomes useless.

Seen in this light Po-deri's demands seem more reasonable: 'The stubborn refusal of the elder brother to accept any but the original hook did not necessarily stem from perversity'. The hook is a talismanic object and 'separation from [it] might mean a complete loss of luck and economic ruin'. One's success at one's trade is closely bound up with the use of the tools that have served one well so far. And the luck is not transferable - your hook is lucky for you but will not be so for me.

I'm tempted to read this in relation to that tension between, on the one hand, what happens to you and, on the other, what you do for yourself. The focus on the hook is somehow emblematic of the need to pay attention to the detail of equipment, while acknowledging that these preparations set up the conditions to receive good fortune. What is perhaps rather shocking, though, is how this story continues. Things do not, in the end, go Po-deri's way. But I'll come to that another time!

     

     Angling in Modern Japan: Awaji Island

luck on the sea, luck in the mountains

The Kojiki is a Shinto text - a compilation of mythological material assembled by imperial command in early 8th-century Japan. In volume I, section 39 we learn the story of two brothers, 'His Augustness Fire-Shine' (the elder one) and 'His Augustness Fire-Subside' (the younger). The first translator of the Kojiki, Basil Hall Chamberlain, chose these as translations of the Japanese names Ho-deri-no-mikoto and and Ho-wori-no-mikoto, so we can also call them Hoderi and Howori.

Chamberlain described the story as 'a very curious legend' and it is, indeed, hard to know how to read it. Hoderi and Howori have something in common with Walton's Piscator and Venator, in that the former is entirely committed to fishing and the latter to hunting. Chamberlain says that Hoderi 'got his luck on the sea' and Howori 'in the mountains', adding a little more about the term 'luck' in a footnote:

For the archaic Japanese word sachi, here rendered 'luck,' there is no satisfactory English equivalent. Its original and most usual significance is 'luck,' 'happiness;' then that which a man is lucky in or skillful at, - his 'forte;' and finally that which he procures by his luck or skill and the implements which he uses in procuring it.

The crux of the story is that Hoderi and Howori decide to swap their 'luck'. The idea comes from the younger brother, the hunter, and initially the fisherman, is reluctant. But in the end Howori prevails and goes down to the sea to see what he can catch. The text does not tell us how Hoderi got on in the mountains but Howori was a failure as a fisherman. He 'never got a single fish' and, what is more, 'he lost the fish hook in the sea'.

The elder brother, who now emerges as a rather austere figure, suggests that they end the experiment: 'A mountain-luck is a luck of its own and a sea-luck is a luck of its own. Let each of us now restore to the other his luck.' In another footnote, Chamberlain interprets this as an assertion of the need to accept what is naturally so and he glosses Hoderi's speech in a way that resembles the most stultifying bureaucratese: 'Some men are naturally good hunters and others naturally good fishermen. Let us therefore restore to each other the implements necessary to the successful following of our avocations.'  Howori is not, of course, in a position to return the implement necessary to the successful following of his brother's avocation because he has lost it in the waves. He tries to make amends by breaking up his sword and fashioning five hundred new fish hooks from it but Hoderi, who sounds increasingly priggish, insists that he wants the original.

The next section of the Kojiki explains how Howori managed to recover the hook and we'll come to that another time. But what have we gleaned from the story so far? Is it a tale about wisdom? A rather conservative tale perhaps? People should stick to the sphere that is ordained for them? Do not start fishing if you aren't a fisherman to start with? There must be some material on the story hidden away in the murky depths of the library - lost like Hoderi's hook. When I have a moment, I'll go down there and look for it.